A variety of different types of records are being increasingly maintained in an electronic format so as to facilitate the identification, retrieval and sharing of the records while correspondingly reducing the need for physical records. One type of record that is being increasingly stored in electronic form is a patient record. A patient record may be maintained by a healthcare facility and may include information regarding a patient, such as various demographic attributes of the patient, e.g., name, address, date of birth, etc., and encounters of the patient with the healthcare facility. A patient record may also include or be associated with other information, such as one or more documents related to the patient's healthcare including, for example, the physician's notes, lab results and/or images of the patient, e.g., x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, computer aided tomography (CAT) scans, etc.
Some persons may visit multiple healthcare facilities over the course of time. These healthcare facilities may be owned and operated by different healthcare organizations. Each healthcare facility may maintain a patient record, but the patient records maintained by the different healthcare facilities may be independent of one another since the different healthcare organizations that own and operate the healthcare facilities may not share patient records or otherwise cooperate to maintain a common patient record.
In order to have a more complete and comprehensive understanding of a patient's health, a physician or other healthcare practitioner may wish to have access to all of the patient records, regardless of the healthcare facility that created and maintains the patient records. However, in an instance in which a person has visited multiple healthcare facilities that are owned or operated by different healthcare organizations and unless the person has collected and provides a physician or other healthcare practitioner with all of their patient records from the various healthcare facilities that they have visited, the physician or other healthcare practitioner may have difficulty accessing or be unable to access the plurality of patient records maintained for the person by the various healthcare facilities. This difficulty may be exacerbated by the assignment of a different, unique patient identifier to the patient by at least some of the healthcare facilities since a healthcare practitioner may be unaware of the patient identifier associated with the patient by other healthcare facilities and, as such, may have difficulty identifying the patient to the other healthcare facilities.
Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) have been developed in order to, among other things, process patient records including matching patient records that are determined to be associated with the same person. For example, health information exchanges are configured to identify and link those patient records that are associated with the same person even though the patient records may have been created by different healthcare organizations and may have different patient identifiers associated therewith. By linking the patient records from various healthcare organizations that are associated with the same person, a healthcare professional may have a more complete picture of the patient's medical history.
A variety of patient matching strategies have been developed in order to link patient records that are associated with the same person. For example, the various patient matching strategies may rely upon different demographic information drawn from the patient records in an effort to determine whether the patient records are associated with the same person. Additionally or alternatively, the various patient matching strategies may differently weight matches between different types of demographic information extracted from the patient records and/or may the patient records to satisfy different thresholds in order to determine whether two or more patient records are associated with the same person.
Based upon their design, some patient matching strategies are more aggressive in that a greater percentage of patient records are identified to be associated with the same person, while other patient matching strategies are more conservative in that a lower percentage of patient records are identified to be associated with the same person. While each patient matching strategy facilitates the identification of patient records that are associated with the same person, each patient matching strategy is generally designed in such a manner as to have both strengths and weaknesses in regards to the identification of patient records associated with the same person. For example, more aggressive patient matching strategies may suffer from an increased percentage of false positives in which patient records are incorrectly identified to be associated with this same person, while more conservative patient matching strategies may suffer from an increased percentage of false negatives in which a larger percentage of patient records that are actually associated with the person in question are not identified as being so associated. As a result, different healthcare organizations and/or different health information exchanges may employ different patient matching strategies dependent upon the tolerance of the respective organization or exchange to false positives and/or false negatives. As noted above, however, implementation of each patient matching strategy results in at least some undesirable uncertainty in the accuracy of the results.